Thursday, August 4, 2011

Working on Scourge of the Demon Wolf

Did some more work on Scourge of the Demon Wolf. I decided a while ago to make it a two in one book. An adventure in the front and a supplement in the back that expands some of the things used in the adventure in greater detail. One part of the adventure revolves around a conclave of the Order of Thoth, a guild of magic-users, called the Golden House. In the supplement half I write about the Order in greater detail than the adventure and the Majestic Wilderlands supplement. I finally came up with a code for the Order of Thoth.

The Code of ThothI will not raise a hand against my peers except through proper challenge.I will train at least one apprentice to preserve my knowledge.I will abide by the judgment of my peers sitting in a duly constituted conclave.I will defend my peers against all enemies.I will not consort withdemons.

Working on something called the Silent Code which is a unwritten body of customs that developed after the foundation of the order. Mostly dealing with how mages should deal with non-mages. Only thought up a few so far.

A mage shall not rise above the mundanes.A mage shall not be impious.A mage shall not war without the consent of his peers.

The first one developed after a series of mages and conclaves set themselves up as rulers. The main exception to this is the city-state of Tula which is ruled by the order.

The second one doesn't cover mage's personal opinions but rather stopping raids on temples and other religious places. A few conclaves ran into trouble after they started a conflict with the local temples and brought down widespread trouble on the Order as a whole.

The last is mostly about conclaves and mages attacking rival orders of magic. Against this resulted from conclaves getting into trouble as local conflicts spiraled out of control to effect the entire order.

My whole Order of Thoth background originally developed out of a mix of Ars Magica, Harn's Shek P'var, and my own ideas. For publication I am replacing the stuff from other games with my own ideas.

I guess Syrivald was pushing the envelope on a few of these. This, I think, is a much more satisfying approach than alignments. It is concrete, creates for cool role-playing, and is more setting specific. Nicely done, Rob.

Bat in the Attic Games

How to make a Sandbox

The Old School Renaissance

To me the Old School Renaissance is not about playing a particular set of rules in a particular way, the dungeon crawl. It is about going back to the roots of our hobby and seeing what we could do differently. What avenues were not explored because of the commercial and personal interests of the game designers of the time.

What are RPGs?

A game where the players play individual characters interacting with a setting with their actions adjudicated by a human referee.

Rules are an aide to help the referee adjudicate actions and to help the players interact with the setting.

Dice are used to inject uncertainty which make a tabletop RPG campaign more interesting than "Let's Pretend".

The only thing a player needs to do to roleplay a character is to act if he or she was really there in the setting in that situation.